Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson (1808-1875) was the 17th president of the United States, serving from 1865 to 1869 after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. His lenient Reconstruction policies set him against Congress, and the House impeached him in 1868; the Senate acquitted him by one vote.

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Biography

Andrew Johnson was born into poverty in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808 and never attended school. Apprenticed as a tailor, he worked in several frontier towns before settling in Greeneville, Tennessee, where he served as alderman and mayor. He entered the Tennessee House of Representatives in 1835 and briefly sat in the state senate.

Johnson served five terms in the U.S. House from 1843 to 1853, was governor of Tennessee from 1853 to 1857, and was then chosen for the U.S. Senate, where he pressed for homestead legislation. When Tennessee seceded in 1861 he was the only senator from a seceding state who did not promptly give up his seat. Lincoln appointed him military governor of Tennessee in 1862, and in 1864 he was Lincoln's running mate on the National Union ticket. He became president on Lincoln's assassination in April 1865.

His Presidential Reconstruction let the former Confederate states rebuild their governments quickly, with pardons for many ex-Confederates and no protection for freed people, and Southern legislatures passed Black Codes. He vetoed Republican civil rights bills, opposed the Fourteenth Amendment, and saw Congress override him repeatedly. His effort to dismiss Secretary of War Edwin Stanton despite the Tenure of Office Act led the House to impeach him in 1868; the Senate acquitted him by a single vote.

Denied the Democratic nomination in 1868, he returned to Tennessee and in 1875 won election to the U.S. Senate, the only former president to serve there. He died a few months later. Historians generally rank him among the worst presidents for his opposition to federal protection of African Americans' rights.